Angola Impressions

Question: What is UIEA, IESA, IECA, AEA, CICA, ICCA and CMEL?

Answer: They’re all acronyms for church and ministry organizations that I had a chance to interview during the past few days here in Angola.

 It’s all part of my assignment to help the Mission Aviation Fellowship program do some strategic planning for the next few years. What a privilege it has been to meet these national Christian leaders and hear their stories of what God is doing here in the fourth largest country of Africa.

I now have another big map of Angola filled with scribbles and notes indicating just what is happening where.  It’s hard to encapsulate all of it, but here are some of my main observations and impressions from what I've heard:

·         Angolan people are still deeply impacted by the thirty years of civil war that ended only a decade ago. Every single person is grateful for the peace that now exists across the country and see this time of peace as an opportunity for new growth—economically and spiritually.

·         Two-thirds of Angola is today quite accessible by road. Although transportation on those roads is not always easy and sometimes demands a Land Cruiser or Toyota HiLux, it still is possible for people, including pastors and doctors, to get to many of the towns and villages of this country. This accessibility is actually quite remarkable compared to so many other under-developed African countries.

·         The remaining third of Angola is really remote. In the south and east, the land area is vast, desolate and inhabited by the most unreached people groups in the nation. These groups, like the clans of the African Bushmen, are still living in some of the most primitive and nomadic circumstances of any in the world.

·         The good news is that Evangelical churches are definitely growing and planting new churches throughout the entire country. The official number of church members has quadrupled since the end of the war.

·         The bad news is that these churches are not demonstrating much collaboration or partnership but instead seem to be building their own little kingdoms with their own Bible institutes and own medical work.

·         New life is being breathed into the MAF flight program with new opportunities to serve such things as remote medical work, Bible translation and Theological Education by Extension (TEE) using two new Cessna 182 aircraft that use a new type of diesel engine. (More on this in my next blog.)

These are only six bullet points out of 35 that I have in my notebook! Now my job is to synthesize all this good information down into some helpful conclusions and recommendations for the pilots and staff of the MAF Angola flight program.